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Taming the Turbulence Inside Pipelines

A pipeline may appear calm and quiet on the outside, but inside it’s a roiling mess. At anything other than low rates of flow, a fluid being transported, like oil, water or natural gas, becomes turbulent.

The problem with turbulent flow is that it creates friction and drag that must be overcome by pumping harder, at higher cost. And while there are ideas about ways to reduce turbulence, they require more energy than would be saved from reduced pumping costs.

Photo

Credit
Chris Gash

But Björn Hof, of the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, and colleagues have discovered a way to eliminate turbulence altogether, at least in certain situations. The key, they wrote this month in Science, is to introduce even more turbulence into the flow.

At relatively slow rates of flow, turbulence is intermittent — it’s pushed along, Dr. Hof said, by smooth-flowing fluid behind it. By studying flows in a special glass pipe and modeling them on a computer, Dr. Hof and his colleagues realized that introducing an eddy into this smooth-flowing zone would eliminate the turbulence in front of it. “One turbulent eddy kills the other,” he said. As long as the pipe is straight, the flow should then remain smooth.

In their experimental setup, eddies were created very simply, by injecting a small amount of fluid through an opening in the pipe wall. Dr. Hof said that while the simulations showed that the principle should work in much faster flows, like those in an oil pipeline, in reality there is no means to affect large, rapid flows.

“I’m not saying we’ll never be able to do that,” he said. “But if we could do this at higher flow rates, it has much greater potential.”

A version of this article appears in print on March 23, 2010, on Page D3 of the New York edition with the headline: Taming the Turbulence Inside Pipelines. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe